D&ad; Maya cityscape

The sky is not ideal, especially as I am trying to create a sort of dystopian style scene. It needs to be dark and dingy, by rotating the physical sun you can change the time of day by the position of the sun in the sky. I want a sun set style so I rotate the sun to nearly the same angle as the z axis. By adding a an image of clouds to the haze factor in physical sky and using the multiply and divide utility I was able to create this dark moody looking sky.

D&ad; Maya cityscape

Here's how I went about creating a 3D cityscape for the first scene of our black holes animation;
First we start with a single street layout taken from the paint effects tool (texture not on my PC.) I applied a physical sun and sky taken from the render settings of mental ray under environment. You will need a background for your cityscape, I started drawing one but figured this would be too time costly so I took a panoramic photo of the Chicago skyline found online at http://www.roadtripamerica.net/skylines/chicago/cold_morning.html. After cutting out the sky and foreground in Photoshop and applying an alpha channel to the visible area save it in a targa format. Create a polyplane and UV map it. Take the UV map into Photoshop and scale the image to fit the UV map. Open the hypershade panel in Maya and apply the 2d texture to a surface shader. Assign the texture to your polyplane, voila! You now should have a city background with a 3D street in the middle and physical sun and sky.

D&ad; Maya Buildings

These buildings were created using Mayas building paint effects tool, the easiest method of creating 3D buildings. The method is simple, there's a choice of 3D objects from trees to buildings and everything in between that can be created with a simple couple of mouse clicks. The paint effects can the be converted into polygons.

D&ad; Development Texturing in Maya

After creating a UV map of a building made in maya, I took an image of building an cut it out it to fit the map of the building. After applying this texture to the building map I decided to add windows by creating a second texture for the building map this time using white squares on a black background. This texture reflects the light giving a glass effect. The sky was created by making a polygon sphere with a HDR image of a cloudy sky texture applied, simples.

D&ad; Ideas cityscape

Having been assigned the job of creating a cityscape for this project, I decided the best place to start would be looking at some examples of other peoples work on computer generated futuristic cities.

D&AD; Black Holes, Maya Earth

The rest of the group were away today, so I decided to spend my time creating the earth and moon in Maya. This touch of photo-realism I think is key in capturing the imagination. I wanted to go back to drawing board this session as I think we need to revisit the concept, focusing less on black holes and more on inspiring young minds. This will have to wait till Tuesday now

D&AD; Black Holes Script Proposition

I decided to write this script going on the idea we agreed on in the previous session. I tried to fit it all into a 90 second slot but I couldn't manage to make the Mobius strip part fit in. It could do with some simplification of terms and some fine tuning still but I think the Idea is finally beginning to take shape.